Tasty Summer Reads Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Tasty Summer Reads Blog Hop! It's a good thing we are doing this during the summer, when I have a fighting chance to work off Christy English's apple pie tartlets or Prue Batten's hazelnut chocolate cookies. Sweet nibbles and a great book - heaven!

My thanks to Anna Belfrage for inviting me to play, and more thanks to Karen Aminadra for being the next to hop into the game! Here’s how the blog hop works: each author invites up to five other authors to answer five questions about their current summer releases or WIP and to add a tasty recipe to go with it. We can all find some great new recipes - and some great new books - to try!

The Reputed Wife

The Reputed Wife is my 2013 historical fiction novel about Herodias (Long) Hicks Gardner Porter. You might be able to guess from her name that Herodias was one of early New England's most colorful women, due to her messy, and highly modern marital history.

Herodias is also remembered for standing up to Massachusetts' Puritan government. She  carried a nursing infant sixty miles from her Newport, Rhode Island, through Wampanoag Indian territory, to protest the whipping of Quaker missionaries by the Puritans. For her boldness, Herodias was stripped to her waist and whipped in the public square. This bold act is what inspired me to write about Herodias. 

Now for some tasty questions:

1) When writing, are you a snacker? If so, sweet, or salty?
Sometimes I perk up my brain in the afternoon with a few cherries or grapes (no keyboard crumbs allowed!). However I have a bottle of tea beside me during most daylight hours. Cold, hot, tepid, I don't care which, just so long as there is plenty.

2) Are you an outliner, or someone who writes by the seat of their pants?
I begin with a timeline of the known facts in Herodias Long's life. She left a record of her early and mid-life - remarkable for a woman in her day - when she described her marital woes while asking for a separation from an unsuitable husband. A transcript is on my website at http://www.rebelpuritan.com/More.html.

With timeline in hand, I strike off in grand seat-of-pants fashion, and half the fun is seeing where Herodias takes me next.

3)When cooking, do you follow a recipe, or do you wing it?
I cook like I write - start with a framework, and take off from there.  We still have recipe cards written by my grandmother Gardner (7th-great granddaughter of Herodias Gardner). They tell me to add a large pinch of cinnamon, or lard (!) the size of a big hen's egg. My grandmother was a winger, and so am I.

4) What is next for you after this book?
Rebel Puritan, printed in 2011, is the first in my series about Herodias, and I'm now at work on The Golden Shore, which will conclude the Scandalous Life series - I think. My original plan for Rebel Puritan was to tell Herodias' story in a single book. I have an Indian war to cover, along with Herodias' children, some of which were scandalous in their own right. After that, I'm considering a tale from the American Revolution, along with a modern murder mystery - or both.


5) Last question… on a level of one being slightly naughty and ten being woo hoo steamy, how would you rate your book?
I have erotic scenes, but they are not explicit.  Lots of steamy sex, at least for me, can override a story line, so I prefer to leave it up to my readers' imagination. That said, I'm writing a scene in the beginning of The Golden Shore which rates at least a 6!

A kitchen scene by Strozzi

And now for the really tasty part - a recipe to share! Allow me to reach back into my genealogy again, to a recipe inherited from Priscilla (Mullins) Alden of "Mayflower" fame. Like most seventeenth-century recipes, this Partritch Stew is boiled, but it sounds pretty darn good.

Partritch Stew’d

Take marrow bones of beef or mutton, boil them well

Strayn the broth, and put it into an earthen pot

Then add a quantity of wyne thereto

Then stuffe the partritch with whole pepyr and marrow

Sow up all the vents of the burd

Then take cloves, mace and whole pepyr, and let them boil together with the partritch

When it is enough cast into the pot powder of gingyer, salt and saffron

Serve it up in broth

As stated above, there are a number of interesting recipes on this blog hop – and some equally good books! Take the time to enjoy.

Christy English
Diana Russo Morin
Nancy Goodman
Lauren Gilbert
Lucinda Brant
Prue Batten
Anna Belfrage
Ginger Myrick
Jo Ann Butler
Karen Aminadra

Rhode Island's famous Hoydens and Firebrands

Anne Hutchinson's statue at Boston's State House

Hoydens and Firebrands is a superb blog devoted to "Roaring Ladies who write about the 17th Century." That would be me, and this week Hoydens and Firebrands are hosting me in a tale about Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, and of course, Herodias Long. All three are noted 17th century Rhode Island firebrands, but Herodias is also notorious for her hoyden-esque life too! Please click on over to my post, and huzzah for Roaring Ladies!
 
http://hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.com/2013/07/guest-post-jo-ann-butler.html

The Hanging of Mary Dyer

Mary Dyer on her way to the gallows

On May 31, 2013, Christy English hosted me on her blog for this post commemorating the martyrdom of Mary Dyer on June 1, 1660. http://www.christyenglish.com/2013/05/31/the-hanging-of-mary-dyer-by-joann-butler/

Here is my post:

June 1 is a sad anniversary in New England history. On that day in 1660 Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston for defying the Puritan government’s order of banishment on pain of death. What events led to the execution of that highly respected woman, and what does Mary Dyer have to do with my favorite Rhode Island obsession, Herodias Long?

 

Some quick background on what the Puritans were thinking when they hanged Mary. Decades earlier they had watched political, financial, and religious harassment by King Charles I and the Church of England escalate. Then the Pilgrims, a Puritan sect who had fled first to Holland, settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

Governor John Winthrop

Backed by the Massachusetts Bay Company, Governor John Winthrop led over 700 men, women, and children in search of a place where they could worship freely. They settled on a peninsula in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. The Puritans’ stated purpose was to be a “city upon a hill.” The world would marvel as a Godly community prospered and the Wampanoag Indians flocked to convert to Christianity. The Puritans would also trade for furs with said Wampanoags, scout for gold and minerals, and repay their backers. 

The Puritans briefly lost the governor’s seat to Sir Henry Vane in 1637. Their response was to purge their community of a liberal, perhaps heretical faction of voters.

Sir Henry Vane

The men who voted Harry Vane into power sought a more liberal flavor in their Puritanism. Anne Hutchinson held meetings in her home to critique Puritan sermons. Soon 80 people were crowding to hear her, and even more were noted to be discontent. Anne was banished as a heretic, but not before 142 men were ordered to turn in their arms, and then to recant or to leave. 84 men took their families and departed, most of them to Rhode Island in winter-spring, 1638. 

William and Mary Dyer and their young son were among the families who began farming on the north end of Rhode Island (then called Aquidneck). A year later, discontent over leadership led the Dyers to follow William Coddington southward to establish Newport.

The trial of Anne Hutchinson

Herodias Long, then Hicks, her husband, and their children arrived in Newport in the same year. John Hicks was not accused of supporting Anne Hutchinson, yet perhaps the Hickses were sympathetic enough to leave Puritan Massachusetts for Newport in summer, 1639.

With Anne and her malcontents gone, the Puritans continued to purge their colony of undesirables. Criminals and suspected heretics were banished. Catholics and free-thinkers like Roger Williams were told to leave. Baptists were jailed and flogged. Quakers began to arrive in Boston in 1656. The first two women were stripped and searched for witches’ marks, then jailed. Then more Quakers arrived. Mary Dyer, who had become a Quaker in England, was jailed in Boston for over two months as the Puritans wrote even harsher laws. Soon Quaker missionaries were being severely flogged.

The Puritans were defensive about their laws. Aren’t they the same as locks on a man’s door to keep intruders out? Besides, the Quakers had plenty of warning, and were guilty of their own deaths. Their ministers concurred, saying that the Quakers were under Satan’s influence, and little more than witches.

You are thinking, “What has this got to do with Herodias Long?” Well, Mary Dyer brought her Quaker faith to Newport in June, 1657. Quaker literature tells us that in May, 1658 ‘Horred’ Gardner shouldered her nursing infant. With a girl to assist her, they walked 50 through the wilderness to Weymouth, Massachusetts to protest Puritan cruelties done to Quakers.

Whipping a Quaker 'out of town'

Herod and her maid were arrested, marched to Boston, where they were both stripped to the waist in public, and then whipped. Herod sheltered her baby in her arms, and afterward prayed that God would forgive the Puritans.

It seems that Herodias Long and Mary Dyer must have been close friends. After all, Herod walked 60 miles to defend the Quakers a year after Mary brought that faith to Newport. I can’t prove from contemporary writings that the two were friends, but the two young mothers brought their families to the very small, very new town of Newport at the same time. They attended the same church, and their husbands served in the same government. Of course Herod and Mary knew each other, and well.

Herod’s conversion to Quakerism, if it happened at all, was brief. She never appears in Quaker writings after her whipping, as other Quaker martyrs did. Her name is not seen in the records of Quaker meetings which became established near Herod’s homes. I believe that Herod was a woman of conscience who spoke out against Puritan abuse, but I don’t believe she was a Quaker.

Quakers walking to the gallows

What of Mary? She was jailed several times in Boston, but was not whipped, probably because she once lived in Boston, and perhaps because she was a woman of some means. Rumors abound that Mary was of noble birth, but no researcher has turned up her roots.

In 1659 Mary was led to the gallows. She watched two male Quakers hang, and then stepped willingly onto the ladder herself. The executioner snugged the noose around her neck and hooded her face, but then she was reprieved and sent back to Rhode Island. Once more the court’s sentence was ‘banishment on pain of death’ should she return to Boston.

Mary Dyer did exactly that in May, 1660. She never preached a word against Puritan ministers or government, as other Quakers did. She disturbed no meetings, nor the peace of the marketplace. Mary came to Boston to visit jailed Quakers, and to defy that order of banishment. If the Puritans hanged her – and they did – maybe witnesses would speak out too, and eventually those bloody laws would be rescinded.

King Charles II of England

In 1661 King Charles II was horrified when he read of Mary’s death, and ordered the hangings to end. Charles also read of Herod’s flogging. The friends’ sacrifices of blood and life were not in vain, for they helped to stir a monarch’s heart, and to end the killing.

What did Herod do when she heard that her friend faced the Puritans’ gallows? The record is mute, but I drew on the friendship and sacrifices of Mary Dyer and Herodias Long for my historical novel The Reputed Wife. I hope you’re curious enough to find out what happened next …

Thanks for Downloading Rebel Puritan!

Rebel Puritan

On July 14th and 15th Rebel Puritan was free as an ebook download from Amazon.  I was delighted and totally stunned when 962 readers jumped on the opportunity!

I truly hope that all of you love Rebel Puritan as much as I enjoyed writing about Herodias Long.  I'm hard at work on The Reputed Wife, my sequel to Rebel Puritan.  The manuscript is in my proofreaders' hands, and I'll start working on the cover next week.  The Reputed Wife will be available this autumn (gods willing and if the creek don't rise).

If you enjoy Rebel Puritan, why not rate it, or even write a review?  Reviews and ratings for the book are available at both Goodreads and Amazon.

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Happy reading, Jo Ann Butler